Re: nasm over gas?

From: Fruhwirth Clemens
Date: Fri Sep 05 2003 - 07:06:14 EST


On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 01:42:20PM +0200, Jörn Engel wrote:
> On Thu, 4 September 2003 12:42:45 +0200, Fruhwirth Clemens wrote:
>
> Do some benchmarks on lots of different machines and measure the
> performance of the asm and c code. If it's faster on PPro but not on
> PIII or Athlon, forget about it.
>
> How big is the .text of the asm and c variant? If the text of yours
> is much bigger, you just traded 2fish performance for general
> performance. Everything else will suffer from cache misses. Forget
> your microbenchmark, your variant will make the machine slower.

Men! Why is everyone doubting the usefulness of assembler optimized parts?
It's twice as fast on my Athlon. I assert the same is true for P3/P4. Just
test.

twofish-i586.ko's .text section is smaller than the kernel's twofish.ko's. 945
bytes to be precise. Please note that twofish-i586 includes TWO
implementations: C and assembler. Just think about how much smaller it will
be when I rip out the C part.

So much for that.

> How many bugs are in your code?

42... Is this a serious question?

> Are there any buffer overflows or other security holes?
> How can you be sure about it?

How can you be sure? Mathematical program verification applies quite badly to
assembler.

> If your code fails on any one of these questions, forget about it. If
> it survives them, post your results and have someone else verify them.

I'm sorry, your critique is too generel to be useful.

Regards, Clemens

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